How do you deal with all the overhead when building a Micro SaaS?
Hey, folks of IndieHackers!
Have you ever been in the situation that you created a cool project over the weekend that could be monetized, but gave up because it just takes too much time to get it to market? I know I have.
From my experience building a "regular" SaaS product (still in the process, but nevermind that), I learned how much time and energy it costs to get all the necessary evils working:
- Building a dashboard.
- Setting up user management.
- Deploying your backend.
- Managing your domains + Let's Encrypt.
- Keeping the development environment separate from production.
- Handling your database.
- Managing API keys.
- Measuring usage and apply restrictions.
- Integrating a payment solution.
- Reset monthly usage limits.
- Handling webhook calls from the payment provider (e.g. canceled subscription).
- and so much more.
Looking back, I maybe spent 20-30% of my time on actually building the logic for my product, and the rest on these "other" tasks.
Now, that is nothing new and I know that there are a lot of good solutions for each of these tasks. You don't have to reinvent the wheel, but nevertheless, you have to deal with these things. It's a big upfront investment of your time before you can get your product in the hands of your first users and test if you're building something that actually works.
How do you deal with these things in the context of a Micro SaaS?
Let's assume I've built an API that solves a very specific problem. Maybe it took me only 2-3 days of coding to build a first version that works because I have some domain knowledge. Then I still have to deal with all the overhead I mentioned above which might take me a whole month to get my product ready for testing. In other words, the overhead might make up 95% of my time building the product.
Are there any "shortcuts" or special providers that help you out? Did anyone ever used some of these "API marketplaces"?
I'd love to hear your thoughts on that. I'm very open to the possibility that I'm seeing problems here that don't exist.
Tl;dr:
Launching any SaaS business comes with a lot of overhead. For a normal SaaS that aims for a large portion of the market, this upfront investment makes sense but is that also true for a Micro SaaS aiming for 1kMRR?
